Standards & review process
Last updated
This page documents how work is scoped, executed, and reviewed here — both the paid engagements and the technical guides published on this site. It exists so a prospective client, or a reader following one of the guides, can see the method before committing to either.
How engagements are scoped
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute scoping call to walk your site, goals, audience, and timeline. You get a written fit assessment the same business day, with either a fixed quote or an honest referral elsewhere if the work is not a fit. No retainer or contract is required to reach that point. Work is scoped as fixed-bid projects with a defined start and end date, or as an ongoing monthly managed-care plan.
The review process before anything ships
I measure before I change anything. For an optimization engagement that means a full-site audit — technical SEO, structured data, performance and Core Web Vitals, AEO/GEO readiness, and WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility — turned into a prioritized plan; for a build, a written spec and sitemap. Changes are made in version control, deployed inside a defined window, and re-tested against the plan to prove the gains held. The audit, the plan, and the results are handed off to you — with the source committed to your repository so it survives after the engagement closes.
The standards work is measured against
SEO, accessibility, and optimization recommendations are applied according to published, authoritative standards — not vendor marketing or SEO folklore — and each recommendation traces back to one of them:
- ▸W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — w3.org/TR/WCAG22
- ▸Google Search Essentials — developers.google.com/search
- ▸Schema.org structured-data vocabulary — schema.org
- ▸web.dev Core Web Vitals — web.dev/articles/vitals
Editorial standards for the guides
The articles and walkthroughs on the blog follow the same discipline. Each one describes an approach that has been run in a real environment; commands and configurations are the ones actually used, not sketches. Where a guide references a standard, it links the primary source so you can verify it rather than taking the claim on trust. Guides are dated, and material corrections are made in place rather than quietly. None of it is a substitute for a scoped engagement — see the disclaimer for the limits of educational content.
Corrections
If something on this site is wrong — a broken procedure, an outdated reference, or a factual error in a guide — email kevin.kirk@lonestarspec.com with the page and a short description. Corrections that affect accuracy are made promptly and noted on the page.